Game Genre Frameworks
by Ben Woodhead · in Torque Game Engine · 03/05/2004 (11:36 am) · 6 replies
Hello Everybody,
Torque is being used for many game genres but there is a lot of duplicated work. How many people want to make for example a Board Game, RPG, RTS or TBS game. Why not work together and build all the different frameworks.
Each Game requires fair amount of work that would be common across the genre. For example board games (what I am working on) wants a camera that rotates around the board, FPS want a 1st or 3rd person perpective, and of course RTS want to have an Isometric view that does not have the same degrees of freedom.
Each of them don't fit nesserally fit well with the current tools, for example creating a board game with a terrain in the mission editor may not be what you are wanting to do, some modifications may make this process much easier. It would also become very useful to modify the mission editor if you were planing on allow other people to create missions for your game.
There are many issues that each team is going to have to solve. I know there are lots of resources and if you can't find the answer there then you can find it in the forum. Consider the fact the forum has tons of questions regarding genres or people trying to solve the same problem someone else has already solved.
I feel that GG is a great Open Source community and everybody here is willing to help each other out but building the framework independently of the rest of gg is not a productive or robust way to do things. We could have peer review going and teams of people learning from each other as they worked on there framework together and there game seperately. I know people want to publish there games but the game is what goes on top of the technology.
Thanks you,
Ben Woodhead
Torque is being used for many game genres but there is a lot of duplicated work. How many people want to make for example a Board Game, RPG, RTS or TBS game. Why not work together and build all the different frameworks.
Each Game requires fair amount of work that would be common across the genre. For example board games (what I am working on) wants a camera that rotates around the board, FPS want a 1st or 3rd person perpective, and of course RTS want to have an Isometric view that does not have the same degrees of freedom.
Each of them don't fit nesserally fit well with the current tools, for example creating a board game with a terrain in the mission editor may not be what you are wanting to do, some modifications may make this process much easier. It would also become very useful to modify the mission editor if you were planing on allow other people to create missions for your game.
There are many issues that each team is going to have to solve. I know there are lots of resources and if you can't find the answer there then you can find it in the forum. Consider the fact the forum has tons of questions regarding genres or people trying to solve the same problem someone else has already solved.
I feel that GG is a great Open Source community and everybody here is willing to help each other out but building the framework independently of the rest of gg is not a productive or robust way to do things. We could have peer review going and teams of people learning from each other as they worked on there framework together and there game seperately. I know people want to publish there games but the game is what goes on top of the technology.
Thanks you,
Ben Woodhead
About the author
#3
03/05/2004 (12:26 pm)
I think Ben Garney has a simple RTS framework he may put up for sale or something, but it was awhile ago when I read it.
#4
Not to say stuff like GameBeavers isn't going out there and doing cool things. So it's not like you _can't_ do that sort of collaborative work.
I might add that Torque is also not very well architected for that sort of plug and play gameplay, unfortunately. So it would be hard to have a shared codebase that wasn't bloated.
03/07/2004 (12:30 pm)
I think that this is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, it's been tried before (like with the TCP) and hasn't worked out too well, so it looks like we're gonna have to rely on capitalism for a while.Not to say stuff like GameBeavers isn't going out there and doing cool things. So it's not like you _can't_ do that sort of collaborative work.
I might add that Torque is also not very well architected for that sort of plug and play gameplay, unfortunately. So it would be hard to have a shared codebase that wasn't bloated.
#5
Thanks for the responce. Ya, it seems that there is not a lot of interest in this idea so I guess not. :(.
I was actually thinking was to create sperate excecutables tuned for a specific task. The current torque.exe file is geered towards FPS, thats not to say that it can be changed but the player, camera and tools work very well for that.
So the idea is to create a different project (for vc anyway) that would be very similar to the excesting one but the stuff like the player would be removed and replaced with something more appropriate for peices (in a board game case) and have a new camera class, and what ever other modifications that may be needed.
So I guess its not so much a plugin but more of a tuned project geered directly to the task at hand.
Thanks, Ben
03/08/2004 (5:00 am)
Hello Ben, Thanks for the responce. Ya, it seems that there is not a lot of interest in this idea so I guess not. :(.
I was actually thinking was to create sperate excecutables tuned for a specific task. The current torque.exe file is geered towards FPS, thats not to say that it can be changed but the player, camera and tools work very well for that.
So the idea is to create a different project (for vc anyway) that would be very similar to the excesting one but the stuff like the player would be removed and replaced with something more appropriate for peices (in a board game case) and have a new camera class, and what ever other modifications that may be needed.
So I guess its not so much a plugin but more of a tuned project geered directly to the task at hand.
Thanks, Ben
#6
03/08/2004 (8:49 pm)
Sounds like a good good idea, like I said. Give it a try, you might get good results. But be aware of history and move forward knowing what pitfalls you may run into. :) 
Torque Owner Nicolas Quijano